JLELSE's Blog

Planning for Scotland, second try

Published on 2025-04-17 in Thoughts

My fiancée and I were in Scotland in 2023 on an Interrail trip. But with some bad luck, we got COVID-19 after half of the trip and had to go home and recover. We always said we wanted to finish our trip in one of the next years.

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European AI

Published on 2025-04-15 in Micro

To reduce my dependence on USA-based products, I switched from using the OpenAI API to Scaleway’s Generative API for my blog. Not only is it cheaper, but it’s based on open-source models, hosted in Europe. 🇪🇺It was straightforward to just add an option to change the REST endpoint in my GoBlog plugins, and then use Scaleway’s API for creating the post summaries and the image descriptions. For the post summaries, I am now using llama-3.3-70b-instruct, for the image descriptions pixtral-12b-2409. Let’s hope that there will also be a model that supports audio transcriptions until April 2026, so I don’t have to renew the credits on the OpenAI API for my Telegram Voice-To-Text bot. 🤞

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New bike season

Published on 2025-04-15 in Thoughts

Yesterday, I started my new bike season and took my bike for a fun ride of about 25 km. I rode the first part of the “Städtepartnerschaftsradweg Braunschweig - Magdeburg” (City partnership cycle path Braunschweig - Magdeburg) between my hometown and a village called Königslutter. The weather was perfect and I truly enjoyed it. For the way back, I took the train that I reached just in time. 🖼️🗺️

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Mandated use of AI at work

Published on 2025-04-07 in Thoughts

Although I also use AI for some features on this blog and sometimes chat with some AI agent (whether it’s ChatGPT, Claude, Microsoft Copilot or GitHub Copilot), I have mixed feelings about its mandated use at work (Shopify is just one company doing it).

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Published on 2025-04-07 in Micro 📍Bad Wilhelmshöhe, Kassel, Hesse, Germany

This time it’s just a station to change to another train. Another hour and a half to my new/old home station. 🖼️

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Published on 2025-04-05 in Micro 📍Todtnau (Kernstadt), Baden-Württemberg, Germany

I visited this place four years ago, but today my family and I went to the Todtnau Waterfall again. This time there’s a new suspension bridge from which you can see the waterfall from above and get an even better view of the valley in the black forest. I was also happy to be able to wear my hat and sunglasses again (sun, almost blue sky and 20 °C!) and record the walk with OsmAnd. 🖼️

My March ‘25 in Review

Published on 2025-04-03 in Posts

My monthly review is a few days late, but there’s so much to do that I don’t really get around to blogging.

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Published on 2025-04-03 in Micro 📍Mitte, Brunswick, Lower Saxony, Germany

Enjoying the nice weather, my monthly review will be a little late. 🌷 🖼️

An even better Komoot alternative? – OsmAnd

Published on 2025-03-26 in Links Updated on 2025-04-03

After quickly trying out Outdooractive, I think I found an alternative that fits my needs a bit better and is also more inline with my values: OsmAnd.

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Komoot alternative: Outdooractive

Published on 2025-03-21 in Links

I’ve found a potential alternative to Komoot: Outdooractive, another German app that offers many similar features. I’m surprised it flew under my radar for so long.

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